Bigduke6

Sniff...sniff...WOOF! Comrades! A bone!

Hee hee. The pointy-sticks-vs-T34s-topic is always a crowdpleaser! The point I was trying to make was that if you pay too attention to individual fighters, or indeed just tactical capacity, then you risk losing sight of what the war goals are, and you run an even bigger risk of misunderstanding what a realist war goal is. In the case of the Finns during WW2, well, the Swedes stayed neutral and they didn't get invaded by the Soviets. That seems to me to have been a pretty good outcome from the Swedish point of view. I find it hard to see how what happened to Finland during WW2 was a result preferable to what happend to the Swedes. Which raises the question: Perhaps the Finns should have considered NOT throwing in with Hitler, and just acceped the loss of Karelia and Pechenga/Pentsamo and that bit in the middle and those little Baltic islands where they spoke Swedish, rather than trying to get it back by helping invade the Germans fight the SU in 1941? Hindsight says that would have been the better move. At the time, of course, Germany looked pretty unbeatable and that probably had an effect on the Finnish decision to attack the SU. (Or maybe one should say "invade". True as of June 1941 the Finns doubtless thought they were fighting to regain what had been lost in the Winter War. But on the other hand those very post-Winter War borders would up being the final legitimate border - with said legitmacy ultimately enforced by the Karelian and Lenigrad Fronts. But I wonder if another factor in the thinking of the Finnish leaders was: our forces are so superior to the Soviets in terms of quality, we don't have to worry too much about the Soviet edge in manpower and material. Whatever the Finnish line of thinking was, I think we can say it was flawed. Any state policy whose ultimate result is the assault of a pair of Red Army Fronts with all the trimmings on one's own forces, cannot be considered a wise move. However, I give the Finns serious credit for bailing on the Germans and talking peace when the jig was obviously up. Perhaps even worse than having Red Army Fronts take a swing at your army is having the Soviets occupy your country. Just ask, well, pretty much any one in East Europe. Anyway, history is littered with examples of countries boasting a superior tactical system who decided they could fight outnumbered and win, you know, that their military was so awesome they no longer had to pay attention to things to traditional war success factors like attrition, material, or public will to prevail. It's a pretty stupid approach and Hitler was only its best-known proponent. I can think of more than a few very recent examples where superior tactical system = eventually losing a war by attrition. I'd be curious to know how the Continuation War is taught in Finnish schools: Victory, Defeat, or what?

With all due respect to the ueberfinns and their sharpened pine cones... Perhaps it might also be worth asking the rhetorical question: OK, Simon Haya just maybe did all the things that the adverstising guys claimed, but at the end of the day, what Slavic language do they speak in Karelia and Pentsamo for the last half century? And which very big non Finno-Urgric country does Finland still really, really avoid making mad? Individual combat achievement is all very good, but avoiding wars your side can't win is even better.

Yeah, and it's a fine idea too as long as modern armies continue only to fight against outgunned opponents who can't hope to win firefights. But pretty much every time the other side gets more firepower, the wealthy nation friendlies demand more for themselves. They eventually get it too but there can be some nasty results in the interim, I'm thinking Boer War for instance. If for instance the US Marines go too far down the road of accurate individual fire and less massed automatic supression, you watch, some clever insurgent/bad guy is going to notice that and exploit it. Maybe set up an ambush with a whole ton of small arms firepower designed to wipe out a squad, or major supression preceding a quick assult on a checkpoint.

And after 70 years in the muck, the thing still rolls.

I agree with this. I think the problem is that the game quite correctly determines the quality of cover and ratios that against the penetrative ability of the weapon, but it does not - it seems to me - take into account internal walls, hard objects inside the building (particularly floors/roofs) and the physics rule that a flying object is less likely to fly straight, the more objects it hits. Essentially - and again, this is my impression - the game treats cover as a single layer, without any benefit of depth of cover. This is just fine when computing an engagement where the defender is behind a wall; there is no depth to his cover. But if you're talking the average house, the game seems to be assuming infantry behind the building are pressed up against the house's exterior wall. Glad to be corrected if I'm wrong in how the game computes this. But I think this could certainly be improved, as at least sometimes is seems like guys inside a building are at a disadvantage in a firefight with guys outside a building behind a wall.

Sez you. Hollywood clearly had a different idea.

Naw, it's just Clint Eastwood on the rifle. He targeted a wire, dropped that on the battery to create a short, and then hit the gas tank at an angle so it would spray fuel on the terminals, and she went right up. Stupid Axis, picking a fight with the side that had Clint Eastwood and John Wayne.

I suspect another factor in perceived MG weakness is, engagement ranges are short, which is a function more of the scenarios (bocage) not the game engine. If the field is 500 m. not 250m. across Joe will have a lot more trouble gaining fire superiority over Fritz. Here's an idea: an area fire order for MGs that trades increased ammo expenditure for increased supression inflicted. We already have area fire "light" so I'd guess area fire "heavy" wouldn't be too hard to implement.

The area that the arcing bullets hit is called "the beaten zone". Apparently it is not a nice place to be because the rounds come in at a pretty good arc, so unless you have something like a roof to get under there is no place for an infantryman to hide.

What can I say? Kim's departure makes me ronerly. Oh so ronerly. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0W5w691w0jE

Aff, it's a little girl. And judging by the neatness of the jumpsuit, the fact the parents got her glasses at an early age and the auto she probably just got out of, me I'd guess she was from the wealthy, double-parented end of the social bell curve. Which usually doesn't produce serial killers. Now, hippie chick or drug addict or Trotskyite 1960s war protester: I'd call all that a definite possibility in this young lady's future. A 1950s girl allowed to dig in the dirt, or supervised insufficiently to prevent her digging in the dirt, I would say would be a high-odds candidate for clashes with authority come the teenage and college years.

I would say, because the Germans had an excellent tactical doctrine and a well-trained force, while the opposing armies had close to no idea on how to conduct a modern mobile war. (It is possible of course to argue the Soviets technically HAD a mobile warfare doctrine superior to the Germans in 1941, but what with purges and political mayhem the Red Army even if they technically had the mobile warfare textbooks they weren't capable of executing it when the Germans attacked.) The trap I think the Germans fell into is that after the successes of the 1940 and 1941 campaigns, they concluded their army was world-beating and that the opposition could never come up with a counter, and further that the key to their success was tactical skill backed with efficient weaponry. This might well be excusable, after all how many armies have overrun Europe and a sizable chunk of Russia in the course of a couple of years, ever? Add in Nazi racial doctrine and their whole military is set up to believe that, indeed, they have an awesome military the likes of which the world has never seen, superior in equipment, training, combat experience, spiffy uniforms, you name it they're better, etc. etc. When they had their first major defeats, basically at El Alamein and Stalingrad, the German military had to consider: Maybe the previous two years of successes were a fluke? Or maybe El Alamein and Stalingrad were flukes aided and abetted by superior Allied material? The Germans military - again probably very understandably - failed that test, they concluded those defeats were outliers, and that battlefield superiority would guarantee ultimate victory in the war. They then applied their resources, even more, towards keeping the German military system as tactically capable as possible. In hindsight we can see this was a disastrous and foolhardy decision. In fact both the Anglo-Saxon forces and the Red forces developed effective counters to German tactical skill. True the Germans remained competent in regimental-level battles, but so what if the Allies could overrun entire provinces and wipe multiple divisions off the German order of battle, in a matter of a few weeks? The Germans remained capable of winning small chosen battles right up to the end of the war, they retained technical superiority in tanks from about 1943 onward. The Allies, meanwhile, occupied Germany. There are those who might see an object lesson in all this for the US, whose military for some 20 years now has advertised itself as an awesome super high-tech world-beating force, while producing a very mixed record in the actual wars it has fought.

We should not underestimate the effect of Soviet doctrine in creating German tank aces. For the Red Army, tanks were only a little less expendable than ammunition or fuel, they were designed for maybe 500 kilometers of campaign driving before the engine and transmission gives out, and their primary role, above all others, was to turn static into mobile warfare by exploiting breakthroughs and moving deep and fast into the German rear echelons. Things like use of terrain and good gunnery and keeping skilled tank crews together were well understood in the Red Army as tactically useful. But those kind of advantages were seen as of marginal importance compared to the priority of collecting really big mechanized units and turning them loose. If some of those tanks struck a panzer ace and added to his score, that was considered the price of playing the game. Maintaining numerical superiority in tanks and tank crews, no matter what, was one of the very top priorities of the entire Red Army supply system. The point for the Soviets was not to win tactical battles, it was to unhinge an entire sector and destroy enemy force because the Germans could not move as fast and as decisively in retreat, as the Soviet could coming at them. It didn't work all the time but by 1944 the Soviets had a system they knew the Germans couldn't stop, the only questions was where the force would be gathered and how far would they go before they ran out of steam. On a battlefield of individual tanks and small units, this translated to large numbers of tanks swamping a targeted German sector and, if the Germans had right AT on site, really bloody Soviet losses - losses the Germans kept saying were unsustainable, barbaric, and proof of superior German tactical doctrine. But what the panzer lovers always fail to understand is, even if you gutted one Soviet tank formation, the operational situation will still suck if the Soviets can launch two more formations where your ueber-panzers are not. And you can't position ueber-panzers everywhere, it costs too much. I think that it was this failure by the Germans to understand the logic behind Soviet doctrine, that led them (a) to seek engagements where they could obtain lopsided armored vehicle exchange rates, almost literally for the sake of convincing themselves that they were superior and ( to put down the disasters that kept taking place in sectors where the panzer aces were not, as the result of Soviet horde tactics. Which it wasn't, the Soviets were a lot smarter than the Germans and their apologists gave them credit for. But there's no contradicting the fact that there were German tank aces and that individually they shot up a lot of Allied vehicles. Not that it did the Germans a lot of good - and on the Eastern Front I might even argue the tactics that created those tank aces was one of the big reasons the Germans were defeated.

The BFI forum needs people like you John, great to see you posting again.

Yeah, if you look at the Soviet numbers it looks like the Red Army destroyed German armored vehicles on a rough one to one basis, and in the later campaigns for every destroyed Soviet tank there were close to two German AFVs destroyed. If you look at the Soviet records you find that Tigers pretty much nowhere were a tactical show-stopper, if they showed up they caused problems but they could and were destroyed, but there weren't many of them and although capable of inflicting losses they never achieved decisive results. Over and over you find reports of entire Tiger units stuck or broken down or abandoned and then getting overrun. Which doesn't mean the game should simulate Tigers as useless. But personally, I would trust any record generated by the Nazi German military exactly as much as I would trust Red Army records: you can assume military professionals were doing the recording but they had incomplete information and were working for bosses who preferred happy statistics to unvarnished fact, and who had a record of punishing underlings who reported unpleasant truths.

A WW2 satchel charge is basically plastic explosive and a fuse in a package. Pretty much all infantry got at least shown how the things work as part of their standard training, in WW2 usually by way of demonstration or a film or some such. Once the infantryman got to the war, if there was a need for him to know how to use explosives to help keep himself alive - for instance clearing a built-up area, or fighting tanks, opening up that safe found in the attic of the house, or perhaps just fishing - then he tended to learn pretty durn quick. It would be a rare squad anywhere where out of 8 - 10 men no one knew, somehow, how to use a satchel charge in an emergency. Maybe there is justification for inexperienced infantry not to do so as quickly or perhaps with a chance of error, but by that same token I would expect experienced or well-trained infantry to use satchel charges professionally. In fighting I'd guess experienced infantry would use satchel charges better than the engineers for blasting walls and smacking tanks and so forth; those that knew how had a slightly better chance of living.

I get your point, however, Comrades Konev and Rybalko would probably dispute that statement.

- Any US infantry unit located within 200 meters or less of any German unit, with no firing over the course of 30 minutes, will replace all its Thompsons and a variable portion of Garands and M1 carbines with MP40. This replicates enterprising US supply sergeants trading coffee and fuel with the Landser. - Any US unit of any type, if co-located with a German officer casualty, adds a Luger pistol to its inventory. No explaination needed here I think. - Any US airborne unit or a US leg infantry unit of veteran rate or above acquires panzerschrecks and/or MG34/43 if co-located. This is added directly to the inventory of the receiving US squad and all German belt-fed weapons are listed as "Spandau" in the US unit equipment inventory. - US infantry NCOs rated elite are able to fire M2 .50 from the hip. - If US forces are compatible with the Commonwealth module and it is possible to have Yanks and Tommies on the same battlefield, C3 between those units takes a hit because of the "two nations divided by a common language" factor. Moreover, the lower the command level of the interfacing units the greater the C3 hit. This would replicate the relative ease with which a US officer from a decent East coast university would comprehend what his Oxbridge-educated officer counterpart was saying, while privates from say a Mississipi national guard unit and a Scots infantry battalion for all practical purposes spoke languages fully unintelligible to each other, although technically both were called English. - Along those same lines, there are more categories of Axis units raised from all of Europe's wierd minor ethnicities, these have similar problems communicating with units raised in Greater Germany. - Unknown Axis armor is for the most part not identified with a question mark or whatever. The game engine just default depicts all Axis tanks as Tigers. This actually is an excellent idea I think...

Still not an ueberkitty, not impressed.

Yeah, but was it an ueberkitty shooting at you? I didn't think so.

On shatter gap, that looked like pretty close range, maybe 200 - 300 meters? Maybe between that and the higher ground that gave the 76mm round enough horsepower not to worry about shatter gap. Or maybe that particular lot of AP rounds hadn't been made by Chevorlet. That was some fast reloading by the Americans, some sergeant really made those boys sweat during training I think.

This is a very good point. The Soviets, er, the Russians like to argue they defeated Germany with little help and overall they are probably right. However, we should not forget that during the Czechoslovakian crisis the Soviets talked about mobilizing major air force elements and sending arms to Prague...and then then did nothing. And when it came Poland's turn, the Soviets waited a while and then invaded Poland from the East. And then when the Germans were mopping up France, the Soviets displayed their iron-hard opposition to territorial agression in Europe by...overrunning the Baltic states and a nice chunk of Romania. It is quite right to point fingers at Hitler and say, "bad strategist". But even though the Soviets at the very least did the lion's share of destroying the Wehrmacht, one certainly can question Soviet strategy in the run-up to the German invasion. How smart is it not only to cut a deal with Facist Germany, help them perform military training on your own territory, and stand by as Facist Germany takes over Europe, all on a bet Hitler won't try conclusions with the Soviet Union next? If we can wonder "What in the world was he thinking?" when Hitler decided to invade the SU, we certainly can wonder "How could they not have seen it coming?" when it comes to the Kremlin. Which brings us back to Churchill. He and of course his advisors were the first ones who decided that no, the Germans were going to get a long war whether they liked it or not. I personally wouldn't call Churchill the Allies' strongest asset, that puts him ahead of things like the Soviet Stavka and how committed they were to making Frunze's theories work, or FDR's inclination to let US big business have a free rein and good profits in producing war materials. But if you want to look for forks in the historical road where you can say "it definately would have gone differently if this decision maker had taken that other route", then Winston's deciding he for one wasn't going to yield to the Hun has to be one of those key points.

I dunno...something about that report really bugs me. *ahem* That was fantastic, one of the best bits of documentary simulation I've ever seen. Great find. Where did they get that VFA guy?

No, not so. The SU felt evacation and expansion of tank construction was extremely important, it all got out in 1941, especially the critical Kharkov factory. Ditto the steel produciton and milling capacity from the Donbass and around Moscow. Tank manufacture was an absolute top priority and the Soviets pretty much kept the entire production process from raw materials to finished product domestic. Lend Lease provided the Soviets lots of things. Probably at the top of the list was automotive, something like 2/3 of the Red Army trucks and light vehicles were made in USA. The arguement is this allowed the Reds to field more, faster mechanized formations, although there is a counter-argument that they weren't limited so much by numbers of light vehicles as a training system that couldn't crank out mobile-warfare capable soldiers and officers as fast as they could, with the help of the Americans, equip it. Glantz says this is a big reason behind his estimate that if the Soviets had fought the Germans alone, it would have taken them about 18 more months to take Berlin - because without the Allies the Red Army would have been a lot less capable of deep operations and massed mechanized warfare. Other Lend Lease big ticket items: alumuminum, food, fuel, and explosives. I've read estimates that something like 1/3 of all Soviet shells fired during WW2 contained US potash mined in Minnesota or wherever they get it, and so if that hadn't have been available, the Soviet munitions dud rate would have gotten a good deal closer to the Germans', who of course for the second portion of the war were using unskilled slave labor to produce their shells. Tanks were also important, something like 10 per cent of the entire Red Army tank fleet was imported - although for almost the entire war the tanks the Soviets were making were by almost any standard better combat vehicles. But numbers help, and Lend Lease did. So again, the conclusion is Lend Lease was a big help to the Soviets but not a decisive factor in their defeat of Germany.